Leah
Applebaum is one of the lesser-known of the American Pokémon
Voice Actors. She does two minor characters (Erika and Susie),
which
is far less than most of the other voice actors/actresses in the show
(Addie
Blaustein does eleven characters, Lisa Oritz does 12, Eric Stuart does
13, and Rachel Lillis does a whopping 26). She also plays the
part
of Nanami in Revolutionary Girl Utena, a really
eccentric
character who is often the comic relief of the show (well, other than
Chu-Chu).
The following interview was given by Kit Fox and appeared in Animerica
Volume 7 #11.

Leah
Applebaum describes her start in voice-acting as “a complete
fluke.”
While working in an off-off Broadway comedy sketch show called My
Thoughts Here in New York, Applebaum got a call from the
director,
who was looking to cast a role for a Sci-Fi Channel program called Think
Like a Dinosaur, with Michael O’Hare from Babylon 5.
She auditioned and got the role, which led to more Sci-Fi Channel
projects—The
Signal Man, an adaptation of the Dickens story, and an original
musical called The First & Last Musical on Mars, in
which
she also sang, and Time Arrow and Time Spiral,
in which two souls keep reincarnating over time. But finally,
thanks
to connections she made through her Sci-Fi Channel work, the road led
to
anime.

Applebaum’s
first anime voice-over role was that of Nanami in the romance series Revolutionary
Girl Utena. “When I first went in to record…they showed
me
the first frame of Nanami in the episode, and she has blond hair and
long
legs,” Applebaum says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I get to live
vicariously
through this character,’ because I have brown hair and I’m short.
I don’t think I’ve ever dyed my hair blond. At times I’ve
wondered
what it would be like to be blond."

Following
Nanami, Applebaum picked up a couple of plum guest roles in the Pokémon
TV series—perfume-store manager Erika and
Pokémon-massage-therapist
Suzie—but she found herself unprepared for the show’s runaway
popularity.
“We were on the plane on the way to the convention, and Crispin
Freeman,
who is an anime voice-actor, took out his Game Boy—I’m still learning
the
lingo of this stuff—and it was the Pokémon game,
and
in there was my character Erika, and I thought ‘Oh my God!’ I
just
didn’t realize that it would be all over, everywhere, the way that it
is.”
At the convention, Anime Central, Applebaum was introduced to anime
fandom
at large for the first time. “One guy came up to me and said, ‘I
can tell when you went up into your higher range when you were doing
Erika,
and she was screaming—I could tell that it was the same voice-actor
that
did Nanami.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God these people listen, it’s
amazing!’ I just had no idea of the anime world, and that got me
excited.

Let’s
talk about Nanami from Utena. What was your original impression
of
this character?

I would
say, first of all, it took me a while to get acclimated to the Japanese
style of anime—the way they do their characters. So some of the
stuff
throughout the series that was already recorded took me by surprise,
but
it’s part of the fantasy and part of the creative process. As far
as my first impressions of Nanami, I thought it was going to be fun
because
she’s this manipulative little brat. But as the series went on I
realized this is actually a psychologically disturbed little
girl.
There’s much more to the character than meets the eye.

So
your impressions have definitely changed after recording more episodes?

Oh,
absolutely. I was pretty naïve in the beginning—there wasn’t
much preparation time outside the sessions. I would go in, and if
there were a few minutes before we got to record, I would read through
some of the script and get to ask questions. They told me the
basics
of the character. As an actor, when you’re in a situation like
that,
in a cold reading, and when you’re in a timed situation, you have to
make
choices quickly, and with good directors, they guide you in the right
direction—“Let’s
take it this way,” or “Let’s try something different”—and they take the
different edits and put it together, which is great. I actually
got
to develop Nanami as I went along, which was exciting in itself.

Where
did you find Nanami’s voice? Did you have to draw from your
memories
of school? Did you got to school with a character like her?

Oh,
of course. [LAUGHS] Actually, the one thing that sticks out
in my mind, when I was little, there was a book that my grandmother
read
to me based on the TV series Family Affair with Buffy
and
Jody, and there was a series where there was a little girl at a school
who was just mean to everyone and conniving and manipulative and bratty
and would go and hit girls and call them names. So Buffy had a
party
and invited the girl over and she was really upset, and something
happened
and they saw that she was a real girl and that she was actually
insecure
and wanted to make friends and didn’t know how to deal with people very
well. So that actually struck me when I thought of Nanamil.

She’s
obviously an insecure, disturbed character—she loves her brother Toga,
and Mickey, and certain people in her life that she cares about, and in
that there is something good. But then there’s the way people
have
different ways of dealing with things, and she obviously, maybe,
doesn’t
know how to deal with them. The fun thing about her is that
she’ll
go out and do anything she needs to do in her mind to get what she
wants,
and it always backfires. It’s so much fun, because you’d think
she
would learn and she never does—she keeps going and going and going.

Poetic
justice, maybe?

Yeah,
that’s a good way to put it, poetic justice. What goes around
comes
around.

Let’s
talk about Pokémon a bit. What do you play in that?

I do
two different characters—I do Erika, who is the manager of the perfume
store. She’s the one who gives the Rainbow Badge to Ash, and that
story is about Gloom, and a lesson in empathy, and how you need to be
able
to understand and not put the Pokémon in a position of being
fearful—being
able to understand what you Pokémon are going through instead of
just treating them as objects. And then I play Suzie, the
masseuse,
who gives Vulpix to Brock.

I love
the episodes Suzie is in because they talk about how it’s what’s on the
inside that counts. Jesse and James have their own salon and they
are very much about what’s on the outside, versus Suzie, who is talking
about what’s on the inside. We have to make sure that the
Pokémon
are relaxed and feel good about themselves and are confident, versus
the
other perspective, that appearance as an aesthetic is the only thing
that
counts. Which, I think, is one thing about the series—I wake up
every
once in a while and turn it on, and it sends a good message to kids and
leaves little messages here and there about how you need to care about
what you look like on the inside and not on the outside because that’s
what really matters. I think that’s a positive message.
It’s
the same with the other episodes I did with Erika—the empathy and
understanding
. It’s a beautiful thing.

I
imagine you’re quite a hit with some of your younger relatives?

Yeah,
I went down south to visit, and when my cousign introduced me to
everyone,
she said, “This is my cousin that does Pokémon.”

All
their jaws hit the floor?

Oh,
yeah, and they would come up asking me questions, and I had to sign
things
for them. It’s exciting to see them getting excited over this
sort
of thing. And the fact that I’m a part of it makes me
excited.
So yeah, I really didn’t know how big of a deal it was until my mom
called
me and said my little cousin said it was the talk of the bus, and
that’s
down in Atlanta, Georgia, and here we are in New York. It made it
more real for me, I can say that—when I was actually able to get
feedback
from people.

When
I go into the recording studio, I do the work, and then I leave; the
work
is done. So after a while, I don’t feel as connected to it as I
do
while I’m doing the work, versus when you’re in a play or onstage or
doing
a film—you stay connected to it for a longer period of time. With
stage, you get the immediate feedback, and it’s right there and
happening,
and there’s a long run of a few weeks or a few months—or if you’re
lucky,
longer than that. With voice-overs, you go in and you do
it.
For me, it wasn’t until I was actually able to get a copy of the work I
had done and hear it and see everything, the whole project mixed with
the
other voices and the background noises, and the music and all that
stuff—if
was like magic, and I could see it after the fact, so that helped me
connect
back to the project again. And then I would go to a convention
and
I would be able to reconnect because everyone there was so…I don’t know
the word.

Receptive?
Enthusiastic?

Yeah,
enthusiastic about it. And that to me made it more real. I
actually realized that people watch this, this is exciting, they follow
this. And that in itself is really rewarding—as an actor, as a
working
performer—knowing that people really enjoy the work we do.

Do
you ever watch the animation you’re in?

Yeah,
it’s easier for me to listen to my voice that it is to watch myself on
tape. But what’s really funny, right when I had done the Pokémon
series, I was waiting for it to come on TV. And I was getting up
every morning, and watching the show, and I hadn’t seen my episodes
yet,
so I skipped a couple mornings. So one morning, I figured, well,
I had a friend visiting and she said “Do you want to turn on the TV and
see if your show’s on?” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s
going
to come on today.” So she left, and I turned the TV on, and there
was my voice! Oh my God! [LAUGHS] It was one of the
most
surreal experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

You
were talking to you

I was!
I was talking to me! Y’know, there I was on TV, my voice was on
TV—and
that was bizarre, surreal, and exciting, and it blew my mind all at the
same time, so I stuck a tape in to get the rest of the series.

Were
you a fan of animation before you got into voice-acting? Did you
watch a lot of it in your formative years?

I hadn’t
watched a lot of it, actually. I just wasn’t exposed to it where
I grew up, in South Carolina and Georgia. Every once in a while,
I’d hear about it and my interest would be piqued, but I was just more
involved in theater growing up—that’s where my interest was. But
as I got older and moved to California to get cast in productions and I
started to become more aware of the voice-over world I moved to New
York
and took a voice-over class, and they said, “Ninety-eight percent of
the
voice-over work is done by men and two percent of it is done by
women.”
And I thought, “Wow, with these statistics, if I get any voice-over
work,
it’s going to be by the grace of God.” So when this started
happening,
and it fell into my lap, I wanted to run with it. That’s how I
got
exposed to it, actually—once I got to New York.

I think
it’s amazing stuff and it’s beautiful—it’s so different from the
American
stuff like Disney, which is wonderful but with anime everything has its
own…aura, it’s place, and there is something different at work about
it.
I love the Disney stuff—that’s what I grew up on—but now that I’ve been
exposed to anime, I’ve definitely been getting interested in it.